Amazon.com sales tax in MA soon?

riverc0il said:

Sucks. But from an overall perspective, something has to change. Many states built their fiscal economies of scale on pre-internet sales taxation. With the internet, you have fewer people paying local taxes despite a growth in population needing services. No such thing as a free lunch, and all that. People complain about states not being able to balance budgets yet they cling to their tax free internet and then complain when that goes away. Easy for me to toss these stones when I live in a non-glass house in NH. But there it is.

Trailboss might know more about this, but I think internet retailers have won these cases frequently because they are relying on laws that were in place pre-internet that had not envisioned an internet driven economy.

Working in retail with an online store, one issue I know as a manager is doing taxes by state would be very difficult for small businesses. I work for a national company with lawyers and techies staying abreast of taxation issues and making appropriate changes. It would be incredibly difficult for small businesses to handle 50 different tax codes and handle the logistics of both collection and distribution.

Hopefully something fair from the feds can get this thing working for everyone without hurting local small business. Only concern there is if people have gotten used to tax free online shopping, it will be a major economic pain to need to pay sales tax again. Could drag the so called recovery down again in places.

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